"
the dead are gentle to us
we carry them on our shoulders
sleep under the same blanket
close their eyes
adjust their lips
pick a dry spot
and bury them
not too deep
not too shallow
— Zbigniew Herbert, from “Our Fear” (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)
"write, write or die."
— H.D., from “Red Rose and a Beggar”
"Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall."
— Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks (translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins)
"Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent."
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
"Four or five stories, soft as clouds, changing shape as I watch them. The form of my life—the external form—is nothing compared with the anguish over giving form to these imagined mirrors of life. Must reality become unreal? Record, then, that we took the train and walked in the royal park at Marly, and lay in the uncut grass under a sky as warm as wool and blue as itself. The chestnut trees looked as though nothing could oblige them ever to shed their leaves; and when the wind bent the grass around the barren flat, submissively, the grass went all one color, silvery, like the underside of leaves, as if it might rain."
— Mavis Gallant, from a diary entry written in May 1959 (via The New Yorker)
"I remember my first birth in water. All round me a sulphurous transparency and my bones move as if made of rubber. I sway and float, stand on boneless toes listening for distant sounds, sounds beyond the reach of human ears, see things beyond the reach of human eyes. Born full of memories of the bells of Atlantide. Always listening for lost sounds and searching for lost colors, standing forever on the threshold like one troubled with memories, and walking with a swimming stride. I cut the air with wideslicing fins, and swim through wall-less rooms."
— Anaïs Nin, House of Incest
(Source: mitochondria, via lavandula)
Sylvia Plath
"I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me."
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
"Writing, she is the fire of me."
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
"Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance."
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life, trans. Ulrich Baer (via proustitute)
"In water, like in books—you can leave your life."
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
"You give me paintings of women with their eyes closed.
You give me grief, and how to grieve."
— Rebecca Lindenberg, “Catalogue of Ephemera” from Love, an Index (via lydianea)
(Source: heliophobus)
"My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women."
— Marguerite Duras, The Lover (translated by Barbara Bray)
